Twitter Amends The Rules That Led It To Slow Spread Of Hunter Biden Story Amid Furor From Republicans

Twitter
TWTR
is changing the internal policies that led it to significantly limit the sharing of a recent controversial New York Post story about Hunter Biden, a decision that follows a day of intense criticism from President Trump and other Republicans.

Twitter says it will no longer block users from sharing URLs to stories that contain hacked materials and will instead append warning labels. “We believe that labeling Tweets and empowering people to assess content for themselves better serves the public interest and public conversation,” Twitter spokeswoman Vijaya Gadde wrote in a tweet.

The social media site blocked URLs to the Post story from Wednesday, saying screenshots within the piece of emails taken from a laptop purportedly belonging to Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter constituted hacked materials. Last night, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said he regretted the initial lack of communication from his company around its reasons for blocking the URLs. “Not great,” he concluded in a tweet.

Facebook said it took actions to limit the story’s virality but didn’t clarify exactly what it did nor did it offer a precise reason for doing so.

Twitter’s decision to halt the story’s spread drew widespread criticism among conservatives over the last two days. Trump lashed out at Twitter in a Fox News interview, threatening the company with a “big lawsuit.” Meanwhile, the Senate Judiciary Committee announced that it planned to subpoena Dorsey and ask him to testify about why Twitter reduced the spread of the Post’s Biden story.